Shared mailboxes

[Dontcallmebby]

Shared mailboxes - tell me everything. How do you manage a shared mailbox? How do you prevent resentment in the team? How do you ensure work is distributed fairly? How do you stop multiple people piling in one one request? Any advice would be so appreciated!

Very common in accounts departments, especially with incoming invoices etc. which all go into a dedicated inbox. Speak to someone who's familiar with how it works from their perspective and see how you could adapt it to suit your needs.

We have coloured tabs with our names on and just tab the work. There has never been a hint of resentment.

One method to avoid duplication and cherry-picking is for a single person to be responsible for work allocation. Each team member has a subfolder, and emails are moved into their subfolder.

How you do this depends on the type of work - if it's everyone processing the same work, then this can only really be random.

Depending on volumes, the person managing the mailbox might be able to triage to ensure a fair spread of complex and easier work. Otherwise it needs to be accounted for in whatever tracking system you have to measure productivity (assuming you do this) to avoid resentment.

Same, we all monitor it and color code as appropriate. We don’t fight for work as such as we work in accounts and deal with different queries. Also have a color for “All” for general info.

We work it on a rota. We have 2 mailboxes for the department and 7 managers taking it in turns weekly.

Then they distribute the work accordingly. If the work being distributed for for a specific person we send it to them/their manager. If it is generic that anyone can pick up I keep a note of who is in/who I have already sent work to to make sure it is distributed evenly.

We have an email flagging system and are meant to work the queue from the bottom up. More of an issue is that we have two inboxes and work coming through a separate engine. We are meant to prioritise one inbox over another which generally has easier work, but that doesn’t always happen.
Our supervisor and manager are never to be seen unless there is a complaint, so we sort of work it out ourselves.

Yes, we have a rota and managers pass tasks to staff as appropriate.

This! The LM distributes the tasks, as you don’t bother looking at other’s tasks you won’t know if you have more or less work than colleagues. And if you did look you’d get short shrift from said LM.